Yesterday was the first day of the Rapha 500 challenge (ride 500km Dec 23-31). I’m hoping to knock out all of it in just four days (85 miles yesterday, 93 miles today including a KOM on the BBL ride, 30-40 miles tomorrow, and 135 miles on Monday riding from Birmingham up to a spot near the interstate in Hartselle where Kristine will pick me up for the rest of our trip up to Wisconsin). Yesterday was also the day that I picked to put in my effort on this week’s Strava KOM shootout climb – Oakdale. My friend Warren St John was back home visiting from New York, and we got in a good short climbing ride on Thursday ahead of a much longer, and more diabolical climbing ride on Friday (yesterday). Basically, I looked at the topo map and tried to direct us to wherever the contour lines were closest together (i.e., the steepest hills I could find). This was all on the way out to the Double Oak Way climb which is 3 miles long with gradients exceeding 20% in several places and maxing out at 25% in one spot. We didn’t finish the Double Oak climb, however, because some hunters or Alabama power workers were at the gate and turned us around. That’s ok, though, because it was still well over 11,000 ft of climbing packed into a difficult 85 miles.

Making the ride even harder, I did my max effort on the Oakdale KOM – 7’07” at an average heart rate of 179bpm towards the beginning of the ride. Here is my heartrate and strava-calculated power data for the climb –